[1] After serving 26 years with The New York Times from 1962-88 as correspondent, editor and bureau chief in both Moscow and Washington, Smith moved into television in 1989, reporting and producing more than 50 hours of long-form documentaries for PBS over the next 25 years on topics from the inside story of the terrorists who mounted the 9/11 attacks and Gorbachev's perestroika to Wall Street, Walmart and The Democracy Rebellion of grassroots citizen reform movements.

In the early 1960s, Smith began his long tenure with The New York Times covering Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and the civil rights struggle, including hot spots such as Birmingham, the desegregation of Ole Miss, and the March on Washington.

In 1971, Smith and fellow New York Times journalist Neil Sheehan were members of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that produced the Pentagon Papers series, based on Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's top secret history of the Vietnam War under four U.S. presidents.

Prior to publishing, Smith and Sheehan spent over three months studying 7,000 pages of classified documents and history, hiding from the government in New York's 6th Avenue Hilton hotel under an assumed name.

In a video tour of the White House, C-SPAN filmed the book sitting on President Clinton's bedside table.

In The New Russians (1990), Smith gave a first-hand account of Mikhail Gorbachev's dramatic political and economic reforms known as perestroika.

That series won the prestigious Columbia - Dupont Gold Baton, or grand prize, for the best public affairs program on U.S. television in 1991.

In 2002, Smith shared the prestigious duPont-Columbia Gold Baton for Inside the Terror Network, his in-depth account of the al Qaeda bombers organizing, training and preparing for their attack on the U.S. on September 11, 2001.

(2004) Spying on the Home Front (2007), and Poisoned Waters (2009), one distinctive feature of Smith's television reporting is his focus not just on examining problems but in Seeking Solutions (1999), his mini-series on teen violence and hate crime, used by the Justice Department and Congressional committees; Making Schools Work (2005), a two-hour special on effective educational programs boosting student success; and Surviving the Bottom Line (1998) a four-hour report comparing the fairness of America's economy with Germany, Japan and China.

Those programs earned Smith and his production team public service awards from the Sidney Hillman foundation and from Sigma Delta Chi, the national honor society of journalists.

His most recent PBS documentary The Democracy Rebellion (2020) shows how grass roots citizen movements have challenged entrenched politicians and power brokers to win election law reforms against dark money, gerrymandering or vote suppression and to make America's broken democracy fairer, more open and more inclusive.

Over 25 years, PBS viewers also came to know Hedrick Smith as a regular panelist on Washington Week in Review and as a special correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.